Where design goes when machines make everything

American polymath: economist, psychologist and one of the founders of artificial intelligence, with a Nobel in economics and computing's Turing Award, shared with Allen Newell. His idea of bounded rationality, that people decide with limited time and information, is now commonplace in economics. His 1969 book The Sciences of the Artificial defined design at its widest: working out how to change an existing situation into a preferred one. That definition opens this post. His struggle was belonging: he held two political science degrees and no economics degree, had left the business school for psychology and computer science years before the prize, and the Nobel announcement itself felt the need to argue he counted, calling him an economist "in the widest sense of that word".

American economist who treats markets as things you design rather than things that just happen. He rebuilt how new doctors get matched to hospitals, then co-built the kidney exchange that finds donors for incompatible pairs, and shared the 2012 Nobel in economics with Lloyd Shapley. The road there, in his own telling: he never finished high school, entering Columbia's engineering school at sixteen; he failed one of his PhD qualifying exams, crediting his advisor with rescuing him from "what looked to be a very short academic career"; a Nobel-winning journal editor rejected his foundational paper because "except for the title, it wasn't about economics at all"; and when he first sent the kidney exchange idea to surgeons, only one wrote back.

American author and management advisor. He spent his early career at IBM in technical and management roles, then left to co-found a two-man thinking studio with James Gilmore. Together they named the experience economy, first in a 1998 Harvard Business Review article, then in the 1999 book, arguing that staging experiences had become a bigger business than selling goods or services. His newest of five business books, The Transformation Economy, published this year under his name alone, argues the next stage is guiding people to become who they want to become.

Author and consultant, Pine's writing partner for nearly three decades and co-founder of their firm, Strategic Horizons, in 1996. He came to ideas the working way: Procter and Gamble, then a decade of process consulting, before the leap into the studio. He co-wrote Authenticity in 2007 and has taught at business schools including Case Western and Virginia's Darden. Together the pair built the language this post borrows: commodities to goods to services to experiences to transformations.

English designer, writer and manufacturer whose patterns generated the Arts and Crafts movement: honest materials, visible workmanship, beautiful everyday things. His designs are still in production a century and a half later, and he founded the Kelmscott Press in his final years. His struggle was the contradiction at the centre of his life: he wanted art for everyone, and the V&A records that his papers "were too expensive for most people to afford"; a client recalled him raging that he spent his life "ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich", a remark printed decades after the fact. He collapsed from overwork at 31, his marriage was, in Britannica's words, "a source of unhappiness to both", and when his daughter Jenny developed epilepsy he refused the era's norm of institutionalising her and kept her cared for at home.

German architect who founded the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919, built on the idea that all the arts belong together around building; within a few years it turned toward industry, and its answer still shapes most things on your desk. The school lived in political crossfire from birth: a right-wing state government halved its budget and cancelled the teachers' contracts, so the masters closed it themselves and moved it to Dessau; fourteen years after it opened, its staff shut it for good under Nazi pressure, after a police raid. Gropius himself fought on the Western Front, where he was wounded and decorated, and his biographer records him buried alive for three days by an explosion, carrying night terrors for the rest of his life. In 1934 he fled Germany secretly, via Italy, reaching Harvard in 1937, where he taught architecture.